Palliative Care Services
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Managing multiple complicated medical diagnoses, specialists, prescriptions, procedures and events can feel challenging. When you’re trying to understand your child’s complex health conditions while also making decisions and supporting your child emotionally, our Pediatric Palliative & Hospice Care team can help light the way. We’re here to listen, brainstorm solutions and help share the load.
Our Palliative & Hospice Care team can also help you and your child manage difficult symptoms, such as pain, constipation, nausea and anxiety. We have expertise helping children with medical complexity struggling with lifelong symptoms like these.
Occasionally, children with complex medical issues also carry terminal prognoses. In these cases, the palliative care team can be engaged to ensure that patients and their families are well supported in these extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
At Children’s Health, our team has diverse professional backgrounds in social work, pediatrics and nursing. We work hard to build trusting, strong relationships with our patients and their families.
When to consider pediatric palliative care
Our team provides essential, compassionate end-of-life and pediatric hospice services. But engaging with our team may not necessarily mean you and your child are facing end-of-life decisions right now. In fact, it often means maximizing your child’s quality of life for as long as possible.
Palliative care can help untangle the web of your child’s multiple specialists, many different medications and various medical procedures. Our team works with pediatric neurologists, cardiologists, nephrologists, oncologists and more, weaving varied specialist care together. Making sure all of your child’s doctors are consistently in the loop can ease up the workload for you and your family in a difficult time, so you can preserve your energy for what matters most – your child.
Pediatric palliative care for as long as your child needs it
We always follow up with children after they are discharged from the hospital. Some progressive conditions that need palliative care may last many years. We are there for your child as long as they need us, even well into adulthood.
More children with lifelong medical conditions, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis, are living into adulthood than ever before. This means physicians that treat adults are having to adapt to treating disorders that may not have been common among their patients in the past. So, when your child transitions to adult care, we’ll stick by their side to make sure whoever treats your child knows their whole story.
Palliative care at Children’s Health℠ focuses on helping children with complicated health problems while in the hospital or at clinic visits. We give extra support to children with difficult-to-treat diseases. And because each child is unique, we offer customized care that changes as their illness changes.